one group of researchers has been focused on what autonomous driving systems might see that a human driver doesn’t—including “phantom” objects and signs that aren’t really there, which could wreak havoc on the road.
Researchers at Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev have spent the last two years experimenting with those “phantom” images to trick semi-autonomous driving systems. They previously revealed that they could use split-second light projections on roads to successfully trick Tesla’s driver-assistance systems into automatically stopping without warning when its camera sees spoofed images of road signs or pedestrians. In new research, they’ve found they can pull off the same trick with just a few frames of a road sign injected on a billboard’s video
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“The driver won’t even notice at all. So somebody’s car will just react, and they won’t understand why.”
In their first round of research, published earlier this year, the team projected images of human figures onto a road, as well as road signs onto trees and other surfaces. They found that at night, when the projections were visible, they could fool both a Tesla Model X running the HW2.5 Autopilot driver-assistance system—the most recent version available at the time, now the second-most-recent —and a Mobileye 630 device. They managed to make a Tesla stop for a phantom pedestrian that appeared for a fraction of a second, and tricked the Mobileye device into communicating the incorrect speed limit to the driver with a projected road sign.
In this latest set of experiments, the researchers injected frames of a phantom stop sign on digital billboards, simulating what they describe as a scenario in which someone hacked into a roadside billboard to alter its video. They also upgraded to Tesla’s most recent version of Autopilot known as HW3.
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an image that appeared for 0.42 seconds would reliably trick the Tesla, while one that appeared for just an eighth of a second would fool the Mobileye device. They also experimented with finding spots in a video frame that would attract the least notice from a human eye, going so far as to develop their own algorithm for identifying key blocks of pixels in an image so that a half-second phantom road sign could be slipped into the “uninteresting” portions.
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Source: Split-Second ‘Phantom’ Images Can Fool Tesla’s Autopilot | WIRED
Robin Edgar
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